1. Technical Field
The invention relates to an imaging system for providing an image of the surroundings of a motor vehicle, such that this image can be displayed to the driver and simultaneously used for further evaluations by image analysis.
2. Background Art
U.S. Pat. No. 6,922,292 B2 discloses a wide angle imaging system for providing an image of the surroundings of a vehicle (for example a reversing image display device). In this case, a camera inserted into the front side or rear side of the vehicle is used together with a lens arrangement downstream thereof, in order to present the driver with a view of the surroundings imaged by the camera on a display screen in the vehicle's interior. The image is prepared by refracting and diffracting lenses together with distortion compensation by way of correction. The imaging device used has a non-uniform array of electro-optical pixels, and the display screen is provided with a uniform pixilation.
Another wide angle imaging system is disclosed in DE 10 2004 053 416 A1 which discloses a stereoscopic distance measurement system for use in a motor vehicle which has the following elements arranged in the specified sequence in the beam path of a virtual beam: a) a digital camera having an imaging optics, and having an aperture solid angle range that delimits the virtual beam emanating from the camera; b) at least one deflecting mirror element entirely or partially deflecting the virtual beam emanating from the camera; and c) at least one image field divider element having at least one divider mirror element deflecting at least a first component beam of the virtual beam emanating from the camera, the first component beam overlapping at least a second component beam of the virtual beam emanating from the camera in a restricted spatial region. The corresponding CCD element is split up into two separate regions lying one above another, of which a lower region is used for the driver display. This region and an upper region (invisible to the driver) are used together for a stereoscopic evaluation, both regions having the same resolution.